Harvard Caves, Retracts Suspensions for Five Pro-Hamas Protestors

It would be nice to see someone in the Ivy League schools grow a spine.

On Wednesday, it came to light that Harvard University had retracted the suspensions of five pro-Palestine (and, we may safely infer, pro-Hamas) student protestors. The retraction came after, as the Harvard Crimson notes, "intense backlash from students and faculty members."

The decision to drop the suspensions and ease charges against other disciplined students represents a dramatic reversal less than two months after the the Ad Board — an administrative body responsible for the application and enforcement of Harvard College policies — prevented 13 seniors from receiving their degrees at Commencement.
Harvard administrators faced intense backlash from students and faculty members for pursuing disciplinary action against the undergraduates, with several prominent professors slamming the charges as overly harsh and unprecedented. More than 1,000 people also staged a walkout during Harvard’s graduation ceremony over the decision to deny diplomas to the 13 seniors.
The tensions over the disciplinary charges revealed a rift between the Ad Board and a large group of Harvard faculty members who sought to reinstate the sanctioned seniors into the list of degrees for conferral. The FAS rebellion forced the Harvard Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — to choose between siding with its own faculty or the disciplinary board.

These "protesters," we should note, are rear-end individuals who, by dint of such actions as chanting "Intifada now" and "From the river to the sea," have, in essence, aligned themselves with Hamas, the people who conducted the atrocious (in the purest sense of the word) attacks on Israel on October 7th of last year. That, in and of itself, would seem to warrant a suspension, if not an outright expulsion; that kind of hate should find no safe harbor on any university campus, much less on Harvard Yard.

But the Ivy League, like that famous old gray mare, ain't what she used to be.

Harvard Law Review Editor, Facing Misdemeanor Assault Charges, Lands Plush (and Ironic) Clerkship

The Washington Examiner reported:

Reducing the punishments appears to be a reversal from the initial footing of the school, which saw the administrative body responsible for carrying out the school’s policies, the Administrative Board, strip degrees from 13 students at commencement in May. More than 1,000 people staged a walkout of the ceremony in protest of Harvard denying the 13 seniors their degrees.
Similar to many schools, disciplinary responses to students involved with the encampments attempted to walk a tightrope between critics such as the House Education and Workforce Committee, which has opened numerous investigations into what many say is antisemitic activity on campus, and the students and faculty who are much more politically aligned with the goals of the pro-Palestinian protesters.

What tightrope is there when this kind of hatred for innocents is involved? Kick them off campus, tell the whiners where to stick it, and be done with it. But the top dogs at Harvard these days appear to consist of two groups: one that tacitly (or openly) supports the pro-Hamas agitators and another that consists of soft-shelled invertebrates that worry overly much about offending the first group. It was heartening, some months back, to see Harvard and some other universities at least taking some action to deal with their pro-Hamas agitators who set up encampments on their campuses and even assaulted Jewish students, but now, predictably, they are backing down, choosing instead to grease the squeaky wheel.

Then again, this is the school that boasted Barack Obama as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, based on, apparently, the fact that he existed — sort of like his Nobel prize. He never published any of his work, which should raise a few eyebrows — but didn't.

Harvard's gone. If your kids are looking at colleges, encourage them to avoid Harvard — and the Ivy League in general.